Apple once again tells developers iOS 6 has a 93% adoption rate, dares them to compare to Android

Apple has updated part of its developer website to highlight that the vast majority, 93%, of iOS customers are using iOS 6 or higher. iOS 5 is still in use by just 6% of customers, while 1% use iOS 4 or below. These statistics were measured using App Store visits from iOS devices over a two-week period. Apple CEO Tim Cook also talked about this during the keynote at WWDC 2013 last week.

The obvious message here is one of comparison to their leading competition, Android, where a much smaller group of users, just 33%, are running a version of Android released within the last year, with just 4% using the a version of the latest major release, Jelly Bean. Google's measurements of these numbers come from the same two-week period as Apple's.

Showing that 93% of iOS users are on some version of iOS 6 let's developers plan app roadmaps better. If they can count on such a large percentage of users being on the latest version of the operating system, then they can take advantage of the APIs that were not a part of the previous version. And as we head towards iOS 7, developers will need to decide if and when they're going to release app updates that require iOS 7, and these numbers might help them decide to do that sooner rather than later.

That's the point of this information though (and good news for devs). It means that since the iOS 6 'fork in the road' happened, 93% of users upgraded to it within a year. So when iOS 7 is out we can be confident that we can use and support features in iOS 6 and iOS 7 without worrying whether we'll have customers using it or not.

My first-gen iPod Touch maxed out at iOS3 and my first gen iPad is also no longer updatable. As a result neither connect to the App Store much. So they're left out of the stats... I suspect the 6% is a wildly inaccurate stat.

iOS has still not reached feature parity with Android two versions ago, even in iOS7, and even when devices are running the latest version, many features are not present. It's almost a fragmentation smokescreen.

I beg to differ. Its not that no one likes ios7 I for one love ios7 and all the new features that they are bringing with it. However i hate that flat design which makes it look like something from ToysRus from the bargain bin.